


No Refunds

by Hello_Spikey



Series: Bitten, Bought, and Soulled [2]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-23
Updated: 2008-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 03:11:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15403662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hello_Spikey/pseuds/Hello_Spikey
Summary: This is a dark look at Spike's return trip from Africa to Sunnydale.





	No Refunds

**Author's Note:**

> Technically, it's taking place in my "Bite Whore"/ "Bought and Soulled" universe - and will sit between "Bought and Soulled" and the next chapter. But it reads well on its own, I think.
> 
> Uh - warning: Non-con. A lot. And violence and craziness and despair.

He drew on spite for strength. He was going to show her. All the way across the United States on his motorcycle, sleeping in abandoned barns and chasing the sunlight down the highways, he spurred himself on with the words “I’ll show her.”

Because despite his fears, despite Angel and his split personality, there was a hard core in him that was absolutely sure the soul would make no difference. It would pop into place like the insubstantial thing it was and he’d saunter back, smooth as snot. That was how he’d show her. He’d just return. She’d ask him about the soul, but he wouldn’t say anything – maybe make believe he hadn’t done it. Until she would accuse him, abuse him. She’d say if he had a soul he’d understand some bollocks or other and then he could whip it out like a sleeve-ace. HA! Have too got one, and fat lot of difference!

Most of him didn’t believe it. Most of him was scared out of his mind and pleading with the hard core of stubbornness to turn back. But this was the fantasy that kept him going when the rural miles sped by and dawn threatened and no shelter could be found. One night he dug himself a hole. Not the most comfortable eight hours. But it would be worth it, he told himself, tasting earth and feeling worms and roots and itching in his right boot but unable to reach; he kept his breathing shallow and reminded himself how worth it this would be, when he saw Buffy’s face, when he proved her wrong.

Arguing with a Tennessee native with an accent thicker than molasses, when he was found in the gas-station bathroom after dawn, he thought, this will be worth it. The shit-smell. The long trip. Not being able to shove the skinny bastard who was trying to pull him out into the deadly sunlight. It would all be worth it.

Hiding in the hull of a cargo ship, where he could feel the water sloughing by, ice-cold against his shoulder and seeping in to his bones, he thought: this will be worth it.

Fighting monsters, enduring pain, he let go of spite and felt, no, it would still be worth it, to be worthy. To be loved. He would return humbly and hold his soul out to her like a precious gift and she would finally, finally love him.

That got him through the trials. It would be worth it.

In an instant, he proved himself wrong, when it came crashing down into him like a chain curtain and he KNEW.

This is what it must have felt like, to take a big bite out of the fruit of good and evil, and Spike had no leaves with which to cover the nudity in his heart.

It wasn’t worth it.

It was three days before he could get up from the floor of the cave. The demon shaman didn’t seem to mind. Far from it: the bastard laughed.

And Spike, not beyond seeing the irony, laughed too.

***

“You can’t stay here, vampire.”

“Fuck off,” Spike said, the most coherent words he’d said in a long time. It felt good, hating something almost as much as himself.

Stone hands dragged him to his feet, digging hard under his arms.

“You will not be allowed to starve yourself, vampire. You have gained your reward, now you must live with it.”

Yes, he distinctly hated lurkey more than himself just at the moment.

“Take him to the sea. Follow and see he does not end his life. It would be an insult to the trials.”

“No, not gonna off myself,” Spike said, staring at the sand floor beneath his feet. He shook his arms out of the grasps. “Don’t deserve that, do I?”

Then he was man-handled – or rather demon-handled out of the cave. They looked like men, albeit abnormally large men – like the first demon he had fought in the cave. There were two of them and they didn’t smell remotely human, even if their skin hadn’t felt so strangely hard. He watched their thick fingers, unsure if they would ignite at any moment.

They walked him through the village like buddies escorting a drunk. They spoke the local language with a hollow inflection – you could almost hear the lack of soul. Had he sounded like that? People answered, but did not meet their gaze. The villagers knew what these were then, that came out of the cave at the base of their mountain.

A truck was arranged for and arrived with no money exchanging hands. Spike expected to be dumped into it alone, but the two big demons got into the back with him.

Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, he decided to call them, and chuckled a little, too tired and broken to think anymore, starving, he fell into a fitful sleep, rocked by the dirty metal underneath as the truck bounced its way along a dirt-track of a road.

He awoke, feeling fevered from the heat coming through the plastic cover of the truck-bed. Maybe it let just enough light in to hurt, or maybe he was imagining that. He shifted, trying to get closer to the darker shade near the cab.

The car rumbled to a stop and a heavy object was thrown in, smelling of fur and decay. “Eat, Vampire,” Tweedle-dum intoned.

It was a dog. Its fur was matted and crusted with dirt. Its neck was broken. Spike turned its limp form over in his hands. It was still warm, fleas still dining on its blood.

“It wasn’t killed for you, soul-bearer. It was hit by the truck. Eat.”

Spike still felt guilty. He had to re-learn, now, to drink blood. He brushed the fur aside until he got a small patch of clear skin to bite into. The hide was thin, the vessels inside small and lax. The blood tasted of death and malnutrition and dust.

Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee finished off the carcass after he had drained it. Their human-like mouths opened impossibly wide, biting off whole limbs and then crunching through the bones with savor.

Spike curled around himself, wanting to drown out the company of demons.

Tweedle-dee grabbed him by his hip and dragged him up against him. His large lips curled into a smile, and he hummed. His eyes were vacant but his hands were active, pressing, squeezing, playing with whatever he could get his mitts on. “How easy you would be to defeat now, ‘great dark warrior’.”

Spike turned his face away from the wet breath that smelled of dog fur and corpse.

Tweedle-dee forced his head back. “So fine and thin you are. Didn’t expect you to defeat even the first trial.”

Spike threw a punch at the demon, who grabbed his fist easily in his larger hand and held it, laughing. “You don’t have the fight left in you, soul-bearer.”

Angry, Spike struck with fists and feet. They struggled, rolling over the corrugated metal of the truck-bed. Spike still felt tired, empty and wrung out from the trials and their aftermath, but it was good, now, to feel muscles working and he was seized with a temporary mad euphoria, fighting. He dug his nails in, though they broke against the strange skin like it was marble.

Tweedle-dum only glanced over briefly, more interested in the sun-drenched scenery bouncing by the rear window.

Spike hit his head hard as the truck lurched over yet another stone, bouncing up to meet his skull with a resounding crack. “That’s it, give in, vampire. It is easier.”

No, he wasn’t giving up, he was stunned, he…

He just didn’t care anymore. Spike let his hated body be pawed by massive hands, watching the sun filter through the roof above like a thousand tiny stars.

“So easy to break. Vampires. Not half a real demon,” the monster said. Fingers as fat as thumbs slipped into Spike’s jeans, wrenched the fly open and tugged the cloth down, exposing him.

Spike arched, trying to struggle again. The demon held his wrists flat against the dirty truck-bed, bones grinding into metal from his weight, all Spike could do was wriggle and writhe like a worm on the hook.

“You gonna fuck that?” Tweedle-dum asked, smacking a hand down on Spike’s boot as he nearly kicked him.

“It’s hours to cross into Somali-land. There’s nothing else to do.”

“Fuckers. Demons. I’ll kill you!” He felt panic, the confining space, the terrible bright sun all around them. The demons looked unconcerned, almost amused. He kicked and twisted.

Another stony hand closed on his ankle. “I’ll hold him down for you if you hold for me.”

Spike was flipped, his lips now pressed to the hot metal. Pebbles and dirt bounced and danced over the scratched and mottled surface while something too large to be human forced his ass apart and his hip-bones creaked in protest.

Maybe the trials had never ended. He needed not to scream. He latched onto that goal. He panted through the pain, eyes watering, lines of white flashing behind his tightly squeezed lids while the large demon adjusted overhead, and sank deeper, even deeper into him. A wet sigh of pleasure bathed the right side of his face.

“No more than you deserve, eh, soul-bearer?”

He tasted blood and bile on the back of his tongue. His thighs were gripped and forced farther apart and up. His bones reverberated with the impact, his vision blacked and his head lolled limply.

His forehead rocked against the floor as he was fucked, pressing hard from the top of his eye-socket to the crown of his head and back, his hair making crinkling noises as it was crushed. He tried to concentrate on that. Not the slap of balls against his ass, the strange too-smooth skin, dry and hard as glass against his trembling, sweating self. That feeling of being water inside, torn apart.

The second would not be as bad, he told himself. He repeated that. He turned his head, cheek now pressing and pressing into the truck, neck-bones groaning, ear dragging, on fire.

He thought he went a little mad, then. The thought of fighting back abandoned him. There was no fighting, nothing to do but let it happen. He found himself almost chanting “Cum already, you fucker. Cum!”

Tweedle-dee – the amusing name no longer had any ameliorating power – sawed on tirelessly. He chatted with Tweedle-dum in Lugunda, seemingly unaffected by the exertion while his fingers clawed deeper into flesh, ramming Spike’s hips back and forth over his monstrously huge cock until at last he paused, pressed deep and sighed.

A gush of blood and demon spunk followed his cock as he pulled out, a wet splash as he threw Spike to the floor like a discarded condom.

He felt about as deflated.

“It was good. Tight,” Tweedle-dee said. “But his blood stinks. Is it the soul, or the unclean blood he drinks?”

Spike felt his legs kicked, the truck shifting and groaning as the big demons traded positions.

He thought he would pretend to be unconscious, this time, and maybe it would happen.

The second one was not any easier. Pain was dug into his bones now, and screamed in protest as it was woken from its brief rest. Impaled once again, he scrambled to get his arms under his head, to stop the relentless beating. But then he was flipped. A breathless twist and screaming pain, insides re-arranged, his privates smashed against a stone stomach.

And the demon licked his face, laughing and commenting to its brother about the taste of his tears, and how it was better like this – see the vampire’s face, his misery and burning bright soul.

It was night when they finished. Spike passed out a bit, mercifully. He woke to see them sitting together at the foot of the truck, passing a cigarette between them and watching the road behind stretch out into the darkness.

Spike pulled his jeans back on, feeling like the denim was the only thing holding his loose joints together. Blood and other fluids were still wet on his thighs, making tight jeans feel tighter, dragging his sore flesh.

“How long ‘til Somalia?” he asked.

The demons glanced back at him and laughed.

***

Many speak English in Mogadishu – which was good because Spike’s Arabic was as bad as his Lugunda and the only words he knew in Somali were “beer” and “cigarettes”.

Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee took him as far as the docks and left him there. He was not sad to lose their company, but he felt awkward, like a new bird hobbling on stick-thin legs outside the nest, long before his wings would grow in.

He wandered a bit, startled to see people going about normal lives, walking past him as though he wasn’t something they should fear, revile, kill. Filling the night with their polyglot negotiations. The docks never slept in a port city.

Listening to the swell of the sea, smelling the death-smell of fish and seaweed, he knew he had to go home, if only because it seemed the worst thing to do.

It didn’t take long to find passage.

“I need to go home,” he said, in English, in French, in halting Italian, and he was quickly gestured toward European crews.

It was a Dutch freighter captain that let him up on deck and asked where he wanted to go and how much he could pay.

“America, eventually,” Spike said. “I can’t pay, but I can work. And you won’t have to feed me.”

He laughed. “Three months, English, before we put in at New Orleans. You will hold your belly that long?”

“I can,” he said. “An’ I’m stronger than I look. You won’t regret taking me onboard.”

“Pretty English,” the Dutch freighter captain said, and grasped his chin suddenly with hands that smelled strongly of shit and varnish. “You will lift and bail in the hold, yeah? And at night, you will sleep with me.”

It wasn’t unexpected. Spike nodded and the captain kissed him with a mouth as fetid as a latrine.

He could have asked around for a ship going his way and snuck into a hold. He could have, but that was what he had done before, and now he was new – his soul smarted like the pink epidermis exposed by a slow flaying. He could not, would not, do things the same as he had before.

So he laid himself on the unwashed sheets. He felt embarrassed. Wanting to cover himself, he covered his eyes. It wasn’t long since the rape in the truck. He knew there were marks on his skin, dried blood and things it would be hard to explain. The captain coughed, rheumy and wet while he undressed. Spike felt himself shake and braced his face between his forearms. What if he was too damaged to be desirable?

But they were at sea already. It was too late to turn back. The captain settled behind him, his boney knees pressing between Spike’s legs and a cigarette in one hand, tumbling ash down his flank. He tossed the condom wrapper on Spike’s back and grunted while he prepped himself.

Fingers cold with lube cut into sore flesh, scissoring back and forth once, twice, and then the captain thrust into him. He grunted, sounding almost angry. Thin fingers dug into Spike’s shoulders, the cigarette hot and close to his ear – he could hear the tobacco burn.

He was strangely grateful that it hurt, being buggered by a normal human, that he was still tight enough to feel ripped by the man’s cock. The old captain wheezed and coughed to his completion, a fast jiggling fuck, no thrusts deep enough to do more than irritate his sore flesh. Afterward there was the slick sound of the condom coming off, getting tossed in the waste-basket, and a heavy arm flung over him.

He felt trapped, and uncomfortable. The sheets were long unwashed, smelling of stale, solitary habitation, cigarettes and food. Wet, heavy snores fell on his left ear while his right heard every creak and clang of the ship at night. Someone walked by the bulkhead, heavy boots treading the metal mesh that floored most of the ship.

He was alone with his thoughts, which was worst of all. He knew where he was, what he had done.

What he had done.

He concentrated on holding still, not crying, not falling into sleep and dreams which could lead to screaming or flailing. He just held perfectly still.

In fitful, snatched moments, he slept.

In the morning the captain shouted at him in three languages before hitting on the one they shared, shoving him off the bed. “What are you still here? Out! Out of my way!”

The sun was bright already outside the porthole. Spike gathered his tattered jeans up and sank against the wall. “Let me… just stay a bit. Please? I need to wash.”

The captain looked at him like he’d asked for a four-course meal served in bed.

It was a short run to the galley. From there he could crawl down the hold.

From then on, he left the captain’s quarters after he was asleep, while it was still dark.  
The chip still worked. He found that out hunting rats in the hold. After a blinding migraine made him drop one not even dead yet he had to resort to traps. He rigged his own – the ship mostly used poison to keep the vermin under control. He didn’t want to think how a diet of rat soaked in paralyzing chemicals would affect him. He caught four or five a night, drained them and dropped their bodies into the drink. It was good, to have some routine, jobs for his body to do while his mind still reeled. If he could just keep busy, keep moving, he wouldn’t have time to think. Set traps, check traps. Count the boxes in the hold. Avoid the crewmen. Eat rats. Dispose of rats. Be fucked. Come down to check the traps again.

There was distressingly little work to do, between ports, and he would not join the other crewmen in their gambling and games.

They put in at Suez and there was work to do. He had to hurry to be the bottom man, in the hold, or he would have been in the sunlight. As it was there were some close calls and he had to scurry like the rats he ate to cross the open spaces while the booms were overhead.

The crewmen joked in French, asked him if his lily-white skin would burn. He told them “Oui,” and laughed with them. It was a good day.  
  
Half-way across the Mediterranean the captain beat him.

It was another routine day. Spike had trapped and eaten his rats, checked around the cargo, avoided the other crewmen and their poker games with ducked glances and mumbled apologies. When it was night, he went to the deck, dumped the rat corpses into the sea, and went up to the captain’s quarters, where as he walked in the door he was punched, and then pushed to the floor. The captain kicked him a few times, ripped his pants off and fucked him right there, gasping and wheezing with the exertion. Once or twice he would reel back and land a punch hard into Spike’s kidneys or ribs, then continue fucking in his shallow, quick way. He was drunk, and smelled it, whiskey-tainted spittle fell from his lips, splattered Spike’s cheek.

“That’s for being a terrible whore,” he said, pushing away at last. He kicked him once more. “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

Spike cried, stupid whore that he was, stupid enough to feel the rejection keenly, and barely managed to get back to his feet before leaving the cabin.

He curled against the hull that night, by the rat-traps, hugging his chest tight. He hated that his tears were from self-pity. He hated that a stream of rejections filled his mind with as much pain as the endless stream of murders and wrong done with an empty conscience.

It was self-hatred, mostly, that made him return the jeers of a passing crewman with a long series of insults and imprecations on his health, genealogy, and sexual preferences.

The resulting brawl, of course, lasted three hits – a punch to Spike’s face, Spike punching a stomach, and then Spike hitting the floor knees-first as fire exploded in his skull.

The salt-stained ropes creaked and rubbed raw into his skin. He tried to tell them it wasn’t necessary, they didn’t need to beat him down and tie him up.

But there were enough things he hadn’t needed to do in the past that were as brutal, so he accepted it. He watched the rope rubbing against his wrists. They were thinner than he remembered, his wrists. He wondered if the friction would break through the skin soon. If the bones were thin enough to break from the pressure and another body’s weight joined his. He was shaking up and down, back and forth with the exertion of the sailors behind him. Drops of sweat on his back, greasy fingers digging into his hips, no way to fast-forward through the rape, not able to will himself unconscious.

He counted, mostly. It kept him from listening to the curses and taunts. Kept him from agreeing with them.

***

The captain found him three days later, lurking on deck. He was picking the scabs on his wrists and talking to himself – a new habit he’d picked up that was probably a bad sign.

So he wasn’t paying attention and didn’t see the captain until he was practically walking into him. Spike turned to walk away but he grabbed his wrist.

When he finally looked the man in the eyes, he said, “Do you think you don’t have to pay for passage anymore?”

“No.”

“Then get in my bed, stupid English.”

There was a pause, expectant, and then the captain simply walked past him. Of course, it was just a moment’s business, taken care of and done.

Spike considered, for all of five seconds, lamping the bastard and just getting off the ship at the next port. But then he found his feet had already started fore, and he was going up the narrow ladder that lead to the captain’s cabin.

The room smelled so strongly of the man, it was like crawling inside his dirty clothes pile. Spike lay down on the dirty sheets and considered asking why he’d been beaten and dismissed.

But that would be too much like conversation, which was not something he’d been having. Not since the soul.

He rolled onto his chest, hand pressing into it, feeling like there was a burning ember in there, not sure if it was real or imagined. Maybe he wasn’t even really on this ship. Didn’t really have a soul. Wasn’t really moving anywhere.

The bulkhead-door squeaked on its hinges and clattered like the old rat-trap it was. The captain threw something down on the desk-chair and came to stand over the bed, looking down at Spike. “You are one pretty boy,” he said, and his hand ran down the curve of Spike’s back to squeeze one plump cheek. “But pretty only goes so far. You going to be lazy and just lie there, English? Because I could buy a doll for that.”

Spike wanted to protest. To beg not to be made an active participant in his own debasement. He wanted to explain that he was brand-new, now, and everything that he had done was someone else, that he didn’t know what to do, sex was as new as everything else and his body didn’t feel like it was really his anymore.

But that was crazy. He got up on his elbows and knees and looked back at the ugly captain with his tobacco-yellowed teeth and grey stubble, and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

He had to learn sometime, he supposed, to use his body again, to be present and touch and taste. His hands shook and he gagged, nearly vomiting thin rat blood when the captain pushed against the back of his throat.

Afterward, he gathered himself up to go back to the hold. The captain rolled off to sleep without looking at him and Spike felt sick, wanting to ask if it had been all right, this time, if he wasn’t being rejected.

But then he remembered, in a brief flash of lucidity, that he was being a complete poof. He let the bulkhead slam loudly. Four five steps in the brisk pre-dawn air, he feels the rush of being the one doing the rejecting. He shut it all behind him.

And then he crawled back to his place in the hold, by the rat-traps that are emptier and emptier. He knew he was going to do it all again the next day, so he banged his head on the metal wall and called himself a whore until sleep mercifully took him.

***

New Orleans was a good place to enter the United States. Old-world charm clung to it like Spanish Moss, easing the culture shock, and few people looked twice at a bedraggled man wandering through the French Quarter at night.

He found a ride as far as Baton Rouge with a trucker who just wanted someone to talk and keep him awake for the drive.

Spike couldn’t answer the “Where you headed?” and “How’d you end up in NOLA?” questions. He ended up talking about Xander, of all things. Because Xander was normal, and those weeks he was in Xander’s basement, wanting to die, were now good memories. He hadn’t killed anyone then. He could feel how hollow and banal the stories were – and his remembered gibes, particularly vicious descriptions of Xander’s unfortunate taste in clothes – they all sounded like someone else’s words, like he was reciting a part from a play, one he never learned very well.

It didn’t feel right, pretending to be a person.

But yeah, everyone could talk about “roommates who drove me crazy”. The trucker had rousing tales of a brother-in-law who was always one scheme away from the big time, but mostly filled their tiny bungalow cottage with useless crap – stacks of bottles or bicycle tires – all of which were going to make him millions some day.

They laughed, once or twice.

The trucker dropped him off at the bus station in Baton Rouge, where he holed up for the day. It wasn’t that large a building, and the sunlight streamed in from the doors. He kept moving, leaning against the walls for as long as he could.

After over a hundred years of life, a single day could still feel so long.

He started walking west as soon as it was dark enough. He hitchhiked to Houston. On the western outskirts of the city he was jumped and rolled by bikers, who left him beaten under an overpass when they found he had nothing worth stealing.

He smelled bad, and he looked worse, he knew. No one stopped to pick him up anymore. And there was nothing he could eat.

He kept walking, somehow, almost mindless. He no longer thought of it as ‘worth it’, he thought of it as his penance. He was walking west because He Must Go West.

One dawn he settled in a storefront, too tired to move and too fogged with hunger and hurt to find a better place to hide from the sun. He woke that evening in a homeless shelter, slightly burned. A man with a face like old leather stared at him all the while.

“Thought you was dead,” he said, at last, and handed Spike a cup of cold coffee.

“Where am I?” Spike asked, half expecting to be told ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’, or both.

“San Diego,” the old man said.

It seemed a more impossible answer than the moon. Spike had started to believe, as he quested for it with the last of his strength, that California didn’t really exist.

“I need to get to Sunnydale. It’s…” Hell. Heaven. Pain. Imaginary. “…North of LA.”

“You got people there?”

Spike couldn’t stop himself from laughing. He spilled the coffee and then had to fumble helplessly, getting in the way while the old man cleaned up the mess, wiping Spike’s arm and leg with the same matter-of-fact pressure he used on the table.

“Yes,” Spike said, quietly. “Yeah. I got people there.”

They made him drink some soup, which did nothing for him, but he couldn’t dissuade them, thin as he was, and arranged a ride for him as far as another shelter in LA.

And then he was there – innumerable stops, walking until his legs felt dead to the ground, sleeping and waiting and trying not to go mad, and he was there. Sunnydale lay before him unchanged. Manicured lawns. Manicured trees. Manicured graves.

He must be going mad, for it to all look the same as it had before. It even smelled the same.

And now that he was finally where he was going, he had nowhere to go.


End file.
